I shot him a scowl, which quickly melted as he returned it with a grin. I would learn how to stay mad at them later. For now, I needed to learn more about Adeline. Clearly, she was back, but … shouldn’t there have been a lead-up to this moment?
“Mother has returned from her journey, and she would like to meet you.” Aros managed to summarise the situation brilliantly, with as little information as possible.
“You wanted an outing,” Coen added. “We figured that it was a safe place to take you.”
“She should have some advice about the best way to deal with your presence here in Topia,” Siret finished.
I was in hiding because no one here knew that I was un-dead yet. Our entire group—barring me, their leader—had decided that it was better for Rau not to know. Cyrus was sure that I wasn’t the Beta of Chaos, but he didn’t know exactly what I was, and it would be too risky to alert Rau to the fact that I was still alive … or, not alive, but still living. We were also attempting to hide the recent events from Staviti, since he had killed my mother and actively tried to capture me. His interest was a huge concern, because no one had any idea what he wanted, though we mostly assumed that it was because he had found out Rau’s plan, and he had actually believed that I might become the Chaos Beta. Staviti wouldn’t have wanted to assist Rau in his scheme for ultimate power.
Whatever the reason, we all knew that I couldn’t stay hidden forever. Eventually, we would have to deal with certain gods finding out that I was alive, or un-dead—however we managed to present the situation. All we knew for certain was that I had died with Rau’s curse still affecting me. What did that mean for me? Was I a Beta, but not of Chaos? Could Cyrus be lying to us, and I was the Chaos Beta?
Maybe I was just a Jeffrey with hair.
The power inside of me, the energy I had been trying to control, was quiet now. Almost as if I was no more than a normal dweller again. But … I had died.
“So, no sol can just become a god, right? Staviti is always involved?” I asked as we began to move toward the exit of Cyrus’s secret lair.
Siret wrapped an arm around me and my body sank into his. One thing that hadn’t changed was the absolute bliss I felt at the touch of an Abcurse. Somehow, our soul-link was in full effect, which made me think that only my body had been affected by the blade, and my soul had stayed intact.
“Like we’ve told you multiple times over the past seven sun-cycles,” Siret said, “Staviti is involved in every new god ascension. His process is a well-guarded secret: only he is allowed to visit the temples where the strongest sols are taken to die. Many of them kill themselves at their peak of power, and then lay in wait. He only comes for some of them.”
“So nobody knows how he does it?” I asked.
“He anoints them with water, or at least that’s how he tells it. He breathes life back into them. After that, he brings them across to Topia. They go through a change, waking in a few sun-cycles as new, powerful beings.”
Coen’s voice was gruff. “We were prepared to search out the water he uses to anoint the new gods, but you had already healed yourself by the time Cyrus got you back here, so it was clear that you were transforming.”
I fought the urge to bury my face into Siret’s chest and hide from the world. This was too much for my poor dweller brain, which was probably why, generally, upon death, we were lobotomised and turned into Jeffreys. We couldn’t handle knowledge of the divine.
“Bush is the worst name so far,” I murmured, distracted again. “You gods really need to stop sending the servers to the banishment caves, because you’ve clearly run through all the good names.”
Being so close to the banishment cave meant that it was often on my mind. It felt wrong, knowing that all of the wraiths were trapped there. Wraiths I had promised to help.
Yael laughed, and I managed to push my guilt into a box again.
“I don’t know, Willa-toy. Wasn’t one called Mole a few sun-cycles ago?”
I returned his smile. His sarcastic amusement was one of my favourite things. “You’re right, Mole might be the winner. But Bush is a close second.”
“Are you coming?” Coen called. He was already out of the white room we had dined in, standing near a secret exit that Cyrus had created for our use—a secret exit he’d made clear would cease to exist when we no longer needed his hideout. As a general rule, Cyrus would kill to make sure that no one knew about his secret home, his secret exits, and the millions of other secrets he kept. He was the scary Neutral God and he hated his space being invaded. Even so, I had been using the convenient fact that he had brutally murdered me to get all the things I wanted from him. As I kept repeating to everyone: dying was hard work. I was well within my un-dead rights to claim compensation.
We reached the unmarked door toward the back of the dining room and climbed the stairs up to a stone landing. The appearance of this space was sudden and jarring, compared to the rest of the impeccable white home. It was just a cave: unrefined, damp, and cold. There was a ladder resting on the stone, leading up to a trap door. Our exit. It was covered in grass on the other side—making it almost impossible to find without stomping around the place and waiting for the thud. Luckily, it was located to the side of the banishment cave, so there wasn’t much of a chance that anyone would stumble over it by accident.
Siret climbed up first, followed by Coen, who then reached back in for me. I was a few rungs from the top, but he apparently wasn’t going to wait. His hands gripped my biceps, pulling me clear into the air. My feet hit grass and I found myself standing much closer to him than I had expected. I was staring at the black robes that clung to his body, revealing a simple, embroidered undershirt that did a terrible job at masking the formidable muscles lining his chest. Not that it was trying to mask them. If I was a simple, embroidered undershirt, I’d be clinging hard to those muscles, too. Coen smirked down at me and I heard Aros laughing as he emerged behind me.
“Stop laughing at me.” I forced the words out through a grimace. “And stop listening to my thoughts while I’m complimenting you.”
“Wasn’t laughing,” Coen countered, the smirk still in place.
“Neither was I,” Aros lied. I could feel him behind me now, one of his hands landing on the curve of my hip, his breath against my ear. “I was agreeing. In a way. I’d kill to become your robes right now, to cling to your—” His hand had inched higher, slipping from my hip to my waist, and then to my ribcage, before Coen was suddenly leaning forward and yanking it away.
“That’s enough of that, Seduction,” he ordered.
I could feel Aros tensing behind me and knew that another fight was about to break out, so I quickly slipped out from between them, marching off in the direction of a grouping of trees close by.
“Where are you going?” Yael called out, a few clicks later.
Away from you assholes! I shot back in my head.
“Willa!” Siret yelled. “Where the hell are you going?”
“Oh now they can’t hear my thoughts?” I grumbled, spinning around and cupping my hands over my mouth to shout back at them. They weren’t even that far away, so why the hell was it so hard to hear them? “I’m going to find your mother!” I informed them all. Why weren’t they moving? “And when I find her, I’m going to tell her that you’re all assholes!”
“How are you going to get there?” Rome shouted back, his voice strangely drowned out. “Are you going to swim?”
“Swim?” I replied, in a normal tone, before the roaring of noise behind me finally registered.